


Aeolian Harps

by TheSoundOfHerWings



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, F/F, Fluff, Molrene, hadler, mollrene
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 00:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1367734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSoundOfHerWings/pseuds/TheSoundOfHerWings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly Hooper, 13 years old, has never quite fit in. Though, what little kid does? She's too tall for her age, not particularly interested in the experimentation her friends seem to be doing with the boys around them. Irene Adler, 15, smartest girl in their class with parents that have enough influence to free her from almost any obligations at school, has also never quite fit in, but she's got a superiority complex that makes it hard for her to care. The two girls find each other, naturally, and hold onto each other as they grow older. Sometimes it gets hard to hold on, sometimes they let go, unsure if they'll ever come back to the other again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Perceptions of the Budding Earth

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first in what will hopefully be a multichapter fic where Molly and Irene grow up together.

She’d been thirteen the first time she let someone touch her. Only two had ever tried before that, but she was adamant about keeping her purity. God wanted her to stay a sovereign island, isolated, cut off, saved for one person—one man—only. But then she had met The Girl. 

The swing of the girl’s hips—Irene, that was her name—had God’s stardust shooting out of every movement. Molly fell to her scabbed and knobby knees at the mere thought of Irene, of the pure way in which her older body curved around the bends and latitudes of maturity. She once asked Irene how old she was, when the girl sauntered over to her at the playground, plopped herself on a swing, and smiled that witch’s smile at Molly. _Fifteen, you?_ Molly was scared to answer because as far as she knew, fifteen year old girls were in a class of elitism that excluded all the younger, strangled-looking, greasy-haired, string bean and plump grapes of girls and everyone in between. _Fourteen _, she answered. Irene smiled at her and began pushing her feet against the mulch under the swings. That smile seemed to say everything to Molly; it haunted her dreams, her showers, the soft velvet night that cradled her against the harsh day; Irene haunted her that way.__

__The fateful day on the swings, the wind rushing through her hair, Irene’s elitist smile at the abandon in which Molly laughed: _flying, flying, Rene, look, I’m flying! _And then Irene had shown her how to fly, the upward taut curve of he swing’s trajectory, her developing rear leaving the harsh plastic of the seat, and she really flew, graceful through the air like Molly had only ever seen older girls do. Would she ever be that graceful? Swinging back away from the phantom of her desire, she thought probably not, but she tried anyway. She flew, propelled herself out of the seat, left the safe harbor of the theory of swinging her mother had taught her, and landed half on her toes, her knees, and then her elbows. She ignored the stinging pain in her feet at landing as it resounded through her and faded away, in favour of laughing up at the closed face that watched her. Molly hoped it was in amusement. She didn’t want to be annoying.___ _

____Picnic, red-checkers, reaching up to the top branches, her toes straining, no one else could reach, Irene watched Molly pluck the blackberries from high up, wished, perhaps, that the white tights clinging to her milky thighs were non-existent; those thighs haunted Irene. She wanted to flip up the hem of Molly’s dress to expose the bare of her back, the supple curvature of her spine, the youthful knobs to her thin frame. She didn’t join in the giggles as her friends regarded the younger, more immature, red-lipped and fingertips-smeared children giggling at their supposed victory. Irene shushed them good naturedly, nestled in her soft grass cocoon, legs tucked sideways under her left hip—bark behind her back, a supportive fixture, an addition to her spine, tall, strong; its leave she wanted to shade Molly with, that flora imitation of herself, to keep the younger girl’s skin shielded from the burning sun._ _ _ _

____Molly turned, wisps of hair strewn about her face, her dress lifting behind her—oh, if only the wind were turned opposite. She smiled at Irene, little dab of velvet purple at the corner of her mouth, seed pressed to her left big tooth. Irene’s friends giggled; this time her own deep voice joined in for one round, if only for the reddening poppy rose on Molly’s sweet apples; if only she could taste, to feel the round petname coming out of Molly’s lips: _“Rene.”__ _ _ _

____“Come here, little dove,” she would have mumbled, if the picnic was more like a private ball, if Molly were stretching up for berries to bring her, lay in her lap like a sacrifice, her white knees rubbing against the blades of grass, the hem of her dress flicking against the ground, teasing it. A bow of—trust, perhaps._ _ _ _

____Molly wanted to share her berries with the girl across the meadow, but she wasn’t allowed near the trees. The younger children were held under a stricter leash—hawk eyes corralling them into something easily watched. Molly wanted freedom from those eyes, those tight-barred, prison-scented eyes; she wanted to wear berries and leaves as camouflage and drop next to Irene, hidden by her curved back. Molly knew that Irene was watching her, could feel her eyes prickling the cool flesh above the backs of her knees. She wanted to feed her the berries, to watch them dowsing her tongue in their red juice, to be the one sweetening the mouth of the beautiful girl. Blushing, she looked back toward the tree and held onto it. The towering monument to nature and strength, she thought, she might be able to absorb that essence into her. She could be that tall; she towered over her classmates already, the lone freak-standout, not an outsider but feeling like one. She could be that strong, keeping her complexion unmarred when faced with Irene’s doe-knowing eyes. She didn’t want to be transparent. She pulled her dress down and twirled the berry on her tongue, probing every seed she could find. The taste of the bitterness on her tongue jolted perhaps further into dreamland, instead of placing back on the cold harsh ground of the cemented societal reality she often inhabited. If she could just find, she thought, an abundance of blackberry trees—if she could have a whole orchard of them, harvest each until their height towered over the tallest skyscraper, if she could take Irene here, lead her gently through the roots, tell her to “watch her step,” she wouldn’t be thirteen to the older girl anymore. She would be the mother, the caretaker of this giant orchard, the one that would impress Irene, pull her eyelids wide and make her want to stay with Molly forever and ever._ _ _ _

____But the bell was ringing, the keepers and herding were calling their loud animal calls and Molly could no longer look at Irene across the meadow. Her dark hair became only wisps bouncing above the heads of the interceding masses of disgusting, primal children not touched by the God that connected the two girls. Molly was pushed into the smelly throngs of seasoned-hands and hamburger thighs, sticky from cheese sticks and orange juice, sauce nestled into the corners of their mouths; Irene laughed as her friends walked back more slowly. Molly’s tall tree trunk body was easy to follow, and Irene slipped into the rippling waves of people, silent in her movements. It was easy to separate herself from her friends, detached from the mass of comfortable belonging and, because she stood slightly shorter than those her age, blend into the younger kids. Some smelled sweet, the aroma of citrus and pastries rising from their succulent lips; others smelled of sweat: the running legs, busy hands, “I’ve got the ball” minds that just adored falling in the grass trying to intimate the latest football play from the English national team; one or two had to go to the nurse’s office for bloody noses and lectures on “being more careful.” Irene thought the boys that partook were barbaric, but the girls, she noticed, were rather fit. Not quite as alluring as Molly, no, with her thin hair, the little pinpricks of golden light, her underdeveloped chest, little rising mounds with their youthful perkiness, or her bum._ _ _ _

____That train of thought was hardly conducive to school conduct, but Irene had not cared for a very long time, and the teachers had let her go; her mother, after all, was very influential. Members of Parliament who were adamant about their golden daughter not being reprimanded by anyone more basic than her fifteen year old mind (which was to say, everyone), those members of Parliament had quite an effect on the freedom of their children, and the selective vision of the involved teachers.  
Her hand found Molly’s wrist—only a foot away, just long enough to reach out and to take, to take, to claim, to pull, to slip her hand over Molly’s mouth, the little mouse had a tendency to squeak, and laugh softly into her ear. _Follow me, dove._ _ _ _ _

____Hallways, past the bathrooms, Irene didn’t like to hide, but not far enough—just enough that Molly could say she fell behind the younger children when she slipped, breathless, into class—but close enough that anyone passing would be Irene’s age, would see her grasping the milk-white cheeks, the chin, and though shorter, anyone passing would see Irene’s taking control of the little gasps coming from Molly’s mouth, her primrose lips, her virgin tongue. Molly had never tasted God before, not in the words of the pastor’s sermon, or the black and white text that had always seemed all too foreign to her, but here, with Irene grasping her hip, she finally let someone touch her. Impeding on any purity Irene was not, because her dark hair, her angel’s face, the little innocent bubble that she laughed up when Molly broke away gasping for breath and reddened at the quiet applause that the other kids gave her, it felt like a home she had been searching for in all the sweaty, calloused hands of the boys she’d held. It felt more a home than the hard, impersonal wood pews, and she wasn’t too naïve to suggest it was love, no, nothing like that, but it was a pure form of emotion. It was her heart thudding irregularly in a love-song-melody of tribal poetry against her chest, threatening to stretch it all the way out to eclipse Irene completely. It was the fact that even after the older girl patted her cheek, winked, and strode to join her people again, that Molly could still feel her in places that she had never contemplated before._ _ _ _

____After that incident, when Irene wasn’t around, Molly felt her when she was on the monkey bars, on the downward stroke of the see-saw, on the chairs that she sat crookedly on because if she angled it just right, there, the brilliant light of purity; she felt no shame, not in the dark night that cradled her gently as she found the crests of pleasure, or the way Irene’s lips were not dry and crusty like any else she had tasted, or the way that her shoulders became bolder, her back more curved inward, the way that she began to walk like her height wasn’t a hindrance, like a big tree stretching from the natural ground nurture in it’s towering God-like-ness._ _ _ _


	2. Who Is Your Hero, Dolores Haze?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Molly is sixteen in this one, and Irene is eighteen, and getting ready to go off to university.

          The quiet library nestled the two girls in her breast, the sacred sepulcher of the infinite shelves—the biographies that Molly liked, because they nestled dreams and hopes and minds, memories that otherwise would have been lost forever, and the mystery novels that Irene liked, the absurd and the insane, when the logic made sense of course, which sometimes it didn’t, and then she would have to share that with Molly, giggling so hard that the only thing Molly heard was the deep, gasping breaths pushing out lone consonants with solitary meanings that never added up. They each had their separate sectors, brought together only by their willingness to share them.  
  
          The library lent itself to the role of a sanctuary to the two, where they had excuse to be quiet with each other without the individual anxiety of worrying if the other wanted to talk; they had infinite resources at their fingertips, a wealth of entertainment, oh, and they played their games. One would find the most absurd book and start reading it aloud to the other so that by the end they were trying to hold their giggles in, writhing on the floor near each other in mirth; sometimes they would find trivia books, have little competitions; they would woo each other with poetry from the Romantic era, and the existential, but meaningful, Modernism era; they would read each other ghost stories, most notably Dracula, when it was storming out. It was sepulcher of life to them, and almost every afternoon they spent making indentations of their rumps in the carpet.  
  
          One laid, head tilted sideways on the ground, feet held up by a chair two feet from her bum, feeling as the blood slowly drained away from her feet. Perhaps, Irene smirked to herself, she could convince Molly to rub the prickles away when they fell completely into slumber.  
  
          “Molls?” she whispered, and received a short hum in answer. “Why do they call it “falling asleep” when your limbs get numb?”  
  
          “Your nerves get cut off from the brain so they don’t perceive the signals and that limb essentially gets cut off from the rest of the body. If it happens for too long, you could do permanent damage to your nervous system.” The thinner girl answered in a low voice, though Irene had learned to recognize that particular inflection as nothing so near to boredom or irritation, and perhaps what she loved most, a lack of smugness. Sometimes she pushed Molly into being proud of herself, even if Molly did suggest often, far too often, that it was the result of hard work and hours of studying, and work ethic, and nothing to do with her brain. Irene dropped the book back onto her face and blew a raspberry into the pages, trailing off with the gust of a sigh.  
  
          “Sometimes,” she started, pressing her stocking-ed toes into Molly’s thigh, “I wake up with one of my arms so asleep that I have to literally move them with my other to get blood back in them. Slept like that all night, arm under my pillow.” Molly looked up, tucking a strange of that golden honey hair behind her ears—far too long though, dead at the ends, Irene wanted to cut it, wanted to make Molly anew and shed her old skin, the skin of the mousy little girl who had grown into herself under Irene’s fingertips. Molly smiled and reached out with a hand to gently probe the sole of Irene’s feet. Circles of dripping lace, the impress of Molly’s nail as she scratched an itch Irene didn’t know she had.  
  
          “Better watch out,” Molly said, laughing. “One day you’ll wake up to a dead arm and they really will have to amputate it.  
  
          “Would you still love me?” Their eyes met, Irene’s turning that dark shade, the emerald-black forest under a city, the unhallowed eye of sacred nature, the protection, being lost in a place she knew well, hiding. And Molly’s were open, never bothering to hide anything because it never crossed her mind (rare occasions presented themselves rarely; she was not two-dimensional; she was fifteen, sixteen, five-thousand and sixty eight; edges and swords and the golden hilts that looked bronze to the touch). She cocked her head and pressed a little harder into Irene’s foot, but never hard enough to tear her stockings.  
  
          “Of course. It’s not like you to say silly things.” And that was the end of it.  
  
          It had happened slowly; some might have said, after their initial, it hadn’t happened at all. But the fusing of lips, sweet against tart, against a mousy hide, pleading or demanding (the two sounded so much alike) for entrance and for an escape and even if Irene didn’t realize it, for love. Molly was very good at providing love.  
  
          It had happened, if it happened at all, during the course of that heated kiss—the pleading and the giving. But something strange beyond that, during the next few days, presented itself as well. Molly found herself with her hands full. Usually empty from her donations to other people—money to the ones sleeping on the street without a bed or a God, patience to her sister who liked to hate everything on the premise that it hurt her (Molly understood and her endless patience was nothing other than her own reflection of self, of what she wished someone had given her, and recognizing that she now had the power to give it to someone else), the kisses and innocent hand-holding to boys that would later wrap that hand around something to deprive her of being and self and one-ness and essential-ness. Molly was used to lacking these things, filling up her palms every day only to empty them into the empty hearts she met from when the sun was born to when it died.  
  
          The first night that she went home with her hands full of something other than stark darkness, she cried. She wept with all of her being, until she was shaking and until her house was flooded in her magnificent light. She read a book once about a woman who cried so much when she was born they had to sweep it up into a bad. She felt like that, heaving on her bed, but not because of sadness. Because Irene, beautiful Irene with her dark trussed tree-bark hair had taken her hands and filled then with kisses from her perfumed, unstained lips. Molly had curled on her bed for a while and looked out the window—at the birds conversing on the telephone wire, falling, falling, and then their wings catching and lifting them into the air; she felt like part of them, that she was an integral piece of each beak, she was threaded into every feather. She had texted Irene then, pressed her phone to her breast in between replies. 

_Thank you. MH_  
 _You don’t need to thank me, baby. IA_  
 _No, but the act of thanking seems to me to be very important at this time. So again, and again until you accept it. Thank you. MH_  
 _Thank me with another kiss. IA_  
 _Will do. Tomorrow, my house? MH_  
 _Mother gone? IA_  
 _For the weekend. MH_  
 _Swell. See you soon, honey._ IA 

  


          The texts were infrequent, as it always was with them. Alone time was the bright light of velvet solitude that they both enjoyed. When together, their time was taken up with talking about things that had passed since they’d last seen each other, talking about things that were happening right there, gazing at each other, each too nervous to start first, starting, finishing, talking while pressing their bodies together.  
  
          Irene thought Molly was sacred; she was a temple that Irene could not touch, did not want to touch, but could not help touching. She was everything. Two years, and the girl hadn’t gotten boring yet, and Irene was curious about. She knew Molly through and through, every single thread of her existence, even most of her was predictable if she didn’t know a specific thing.  
  
          Sometimes they texted more than other times; especially at night, when Irene couldn’t sleep and Molly was up studying for her advanced A-levels. The threat of university was always on them, and Molly was certain Irene would go no where except where she wanted to go, distance be damned, Molly be damned; she was adamant that education came before them being close to one another.  
  
          Irene had never felt so loved.  
  
          “Are you scared about this summer?” Irene asked one day, shifting so her nose was buried in Molly’s hair.  
  
          “About you leaving?”  
  
          “Mhm,” Irene drawled, combing through the golden rivers that streamed over her.  
  
          “Yes,” Molly nodded. “I am. I’m scared about you going, and about there being other girls. I’m scared about you going and about there people other people, and a well of loneliness. And I’m scared about you maturing and realizing that you have such a young girlfriend, or whatever it is we are.”  
  
          “You should have told me how you felt.” Molly smiled at that and shifted onto her stomach clumsily, but Irene didn’t say anything about the elbow that jammed into her side as Molly plopped herself on Irene’s stomach and nuzzled into her neck.  
  
          “I feel a lot of things, Rene. But I don’t want that to deter you from your path in life. If you want to go to the University of Bristol and study everything under the sun, you’ll do brilliantly and I’m not going to stop you.”  
  
          “I’ll come back for you, you know. No matter what happens in the years between, I will come back for you.”


	3. gone you were gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I missed your skin when you were East._ Things don't last forever.

         Molly was used to reading—the pale strength of the book’s pages in her hands, and the words dripping into her fingers, gathering there, waiting for her to be done digesting them so she could tip them into her mouth, swallow, and keep them forever. But that summer, she didn’t read at all. She bought stacks of books, so high that they piled over the side of her bed, but every night, every night she thought of reaching for one to help get her to sleep, one of two things happened. Either there was the tap at the window, and she would hurry out of bed to get to the glass in time and pull Irene into the air-conditioned room, or Irene was already there. 

        Every time she thought of losing herself in words, Irene pulled her back into reality—maybe up into heaven—and Molly lost herself between Irene’s teeth, giggling with apology when their teeth banged together or she bit Irene’s lip. She pretended not to hear the sighs of exasperation. She lost herself in Irene’s hands, fingers, pulling her inside out, covering her mouth when her inside-out was loud and unrestrained. There was always a glint in the older girl’s eyes when Molly’s mouth was covered by her hand, and Molly wasn’t sure what it was. But it was there, whatever it was, deep in her eyes, in the way she looked at Molly like a predator, but Moly wasn’t scared. The predatorial nature in Irene’s eyes only went so far to make Molly realize that she was delicious prey, but she knew from experience that Irene would not devour her all the way. The sparks only lasted so long, and then they were gone, and the young teenage fumbling took place. Did Molly know that that was the beginning of an Irene that would perfect the predator role? She might have hoped, for herself, but she lacked the vocabulary and knowledge to put that hope into words. 

        That entire summer, Irene distracted her. They experimented with Irene pinning Molly down and gently letting her hair graze across her pink-tulip skin; they tried tying Molly’s hands up so that Irene could work on her until she was writhing. They didn’t use a safeword at first, because it wasn’t something that occurred to them. They found sexuality in each other, and Molly never pleaded for Irene to let her rest unless she meant it, and Irene. Irene researched. 

        She loved the noises that Molly was capable of making. Wanting more, she scoured books and talked to people and found safewords, making Molly verbalise, denial, and in it she found more love than she thought she was capable of giving. She found Molly’s body afterward, and pressed little encouragements into it. She’d never loved cuddling so much. But in that they found conflict. 

        Molly wanted to rest more often than Irene wanted to take her apart. Molly wanted to cuddling more often than Irene wanted to press her down and make her beg, and there were fights, disappointments, _I can’ts_ and _not nows_ and lots of _pleases_ that didn’t fit the context of Irene’s boiling blood. There were fights, there were tears. And then there was a rift, a chasm between them. Irene: hot, boiling, wanting to test out the powers in her hands; Molly: across a deep universe, not only wanting rest, but wanting that reassurance that Irene used to give her. Molly: the _I’m not enough anymore_ girl and Irene: the _I want more_ woman. Molly helped Irene pack during the day, trying to crack jokes every time she thought Irene might kiss her and Irene giving her a half-hearted smile before retreating away.

        Eventually Irene stopped bothering with pretenses, and didn’t smile. The chasm grew, and the last few days that Molly helped Irene pack for university, they worked in silence. Irene bending over and throwing things into boxes and Molly trying to rearrange them into some sort of order and being chastised for messing things up. Their beds grew colder, not because of the absence of a second person, but from the non-presence of warmth in the first. The fires that they’d been nursing for three years peaked in the beginning of summer and now were snuffed out. Molly’s flickered feebly, and she tried to re-ignite it by visiting their old text messages and memories at night, and Irene just wanted to get out. Molly felt her receding into the realm of university girls and away from her immature body, and her immature mind, and never being ready enough, and she cried only in secret, only when no one could hear her, and in front of Irene, she let no trace of her wet-coal-fire show. She let her go in a flare of martyred indifference, with a kiss on the cheek and a hope that she would find her place. The other didn’t spare much more than a grunt as she slipped into the car and drove off. Behind the car, there was a shadow crumpling to the ground just as they turned the corner, and Irene’s mind provided her with a name, but she ignored both that and the clenching in her gut, and never looked back.


End file.
